Further Reading

Deep Silver CEO Klemens Kundratitz specifically cited "Epic’s generous revenue terms" in his reveal, which gives the game maker 88 percent of all revenue (compared to the industry-standard 70 percent on most other PC storefronts). That revenue-sharing system is "a game changer that will allow publishers to invest more into content creation, or pass on savings to the players," Kundratitz said. "By teaming up with Epic we will be able to invest more into the future of Metro and our ongoing partnership with series developer 4A Games, to the benefit of our Metro fans."

As of this writing Monday morning, Metro Exodus is still listed on Steam and available for preorder on the service, as it has been since August. The Steam version is listed for $60, though, $10 more than the Deep Silver says the game will sell for on Epic's storefront. Deep Silver says it will honor any players who pre-ordered the game from outside the Epic Games Store "will receive their game as expected."

[Update: The Metro Exodus Steam page now notes that the game will be removed from Steam "later today... due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store. The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam."

"We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers," the statement continues. "Especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know."]

Deep Silver's move is the latest blow to Steam's de facto position as the predominant distribution platform for PC games. Previous Metro games have been downloaded by millions of players on Steam, according to estimates from Steam Spy's tracking algorithm.

Just before Epic announced its store, Valve changed its own revenue-sharing terms to be more generous to games that generate at least $10 million in revenue. But Valve's revenue sharing still tops out at 80 percent for sales past $50 million, which is less generous than Epic's baseline 88 percent share on all sales.

Discord announced last month that it would begin offering developers on its Discord Store platform 90 percent of all revenue from listed games.

Promoted Comments

I'm hopeful we get to a point where publishers will launch on all platforms and pro-rate their pricing based on the distributors markup. Set your game price to distributors at $40 or whatever and let them add their markup. If Steam is 30% and the game ends up being $60, and Epic is 12% and the game ends up being $45, well, the market will sort that out.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl